Filmation

Filmation Associates was a production company that produced animation and live-action programming for television from 1963 to 1989. Located in Reseda, California, the animation studio was founded in 1962. Filmation's founders and principal producers were Lou Scheimer, Hal Sutherland and Norm Prescott.

History

Lou Scheimer and Filmation's main director Hal Sutherland met while working at Larry Harmon Pictures on the made-for-TV Bozo and Popeye cartoons. Eventually Larry Harmon closed the studio. Scheimer and Sutherland went to work at a small company called True Line, one of whose owners was Marcus Lipsky, who then owned Reddi-wip whipped cream. SIB Productions, a Japanese firm with U.S. offices in Chicago, approached them about producing a cartoon called Rod Rocket. The two agreed to take on the work and also took on a project for Family Films, owned by the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, for ten short animated films based on the life of Christ. Paramount Pictures soon purchased SIB Productions, and True Line's staff increased, including the arrival of former radio disc jockey Norm Prescott, who became a partner in the firm. He had already been working on the animated feature Pinocchio in Outer Space which was primarily produced by Belvision Studios.

Filmation (game engine)

Filmation is the trademark name of the isometric graphics engine employed in a series of games developed by Ultimate Play The Game during the 1980s, primarily on the 8-bit ZX Spectrum platform, but various titles also appeared on the BBC Micro, Amstrad CPC, MSX and Commodore 64 platforms.

The Filmation engine allowed the creation of 3D flip-screen environments, ideally suited to platform-based arcade adventures. Player characters could move in four diagonal (from the player's perspective) directions, were able to jump over or onto obstacles, and could even push objects around the game environment.

Precursors

At least three games had used an isometric perspective before Filmation's first appearance in 1984; the arcade games Q*bert from Gottlieb and Zaxxon from Sega, (both 1982); and the ZX Spectrum title Ant Attack (1983) by Sandy White. Q*bert and Zaxxon have little else in common with Filmation, though Ant Attack was a platform game of similar style, and was the first of these games to feature an extra degree of freedom (the ability to move up and down as well and north, south, east and west). It was claimed by White that Ant Attack was "the first true isometric 3D game".